Thursday, April 29, 2010

What Matters: Now

I'm usually more timid than I need to be when it comes to exploring, but my brother was visiting last weekend. Being with him made me bold. Together we climbed the steps of the Merritt Mansion (see yesterday's photo). As we drew near we realized the mansion was empty. Had that not been the case I surely would not have been so rude as to press my camera to the window to take this picture.

You can see "empty" doesn't mean "abandoned." Over the past hundred years or so as it's passed through different hands, this building has been well cared for.

I hope City Ventures plans to maintain that tradition. If they're to meet their goal of opening condos by the end of 2011 they should be building along Orange Grove Blvd. soon. This lovely old house will be spared if all goes according to plan. If I'm picturing it right, the condos will be in what was once the mansion's front yard.

The house my brother and I grew up in has also passed through different hands since my mother sold it more than twenty years ago, after my father died. The last time I visited, the hardwood floors were scuffed and dull and the driveway looked cracked and old.

You never know if the next owner is going to love your home the way you did. One day, like Hulett C. Merritt, you'll be gone. Will it matter then?

I've never dared look in, so I'm grateful you were bold enough. I think the Worldwide Church of God, who owned the Ambassador campus,must have lavished a lot of money on their properties and landscaping.

wv: junwis. Sounds Dutch. I'm in the beautiful bulb fields of Holland at the moment.

Love the peek into another world. All that wood is amazing; and I'm curious about the art above the fireplace. Yay for your brother giving you a bit of courage to approach the house and photograph through the window! Have a great visit!

The past is, well, gone forever. The present—oops, it just became the past. The future? That's where I'm headed, like a metaphysical lemming.

When the Upanishads, et. al, tell me that time is an illusion, I have to think a moment. But my thought's like a prayer cloth: tattered by the existential wind.

Does now even matter? I can't get it in my hand, but it's where I seem to live. My loss.

THE FURNITURE

To things we are ghosts, soft shapesin their blindness that push and pull,a warm touch tugging on a stuck drawer,a face glancing by in a mirrorlike a pebble skipped across a passive pond.

They hear rumors of us, things, in their own rumble,and notice they are not where they were in the last century,and feel, perhaps, themselves lifted by tidesof desire, of coveting; a certain moisturemildews their surfaces, and they guess that we have passed.

They decay, of course, but so slowly; a vaseor mug survives a thousand uses. Our successiveownerships slip from them, our furyflickers at their reverie’s dimmest edge.Their numb solidity sleeps through our screams.

Daguerrotypes Victorian travellersproduced of tombs and temples still intactcontain, sometimes, a camel driver, or beggar: a brownman in a galabia who moved his head, his lifea blur, a dark smear on the unchanging stone.